Sick little games
by catzlovecheeze
Summary: "I thought maybe I'd stay in this town a week, steal some money, and go back after Jeff. I didn't expect Lindsey. But Jeff loves his sick little games, doesn't he? Too much to stop playing..." Jane the killer in a random town with a random friend. Also Jeff is a jerk.


I walked into the town one night at sunset, my thin dress offering little protection from the bitting wind of early November. The town seemed lively, and rather nice too - the cheers from a high school football game echoed off the buildings as I passed by the field, as people walked the lamplit streets, bundled up in warm-looking coats and boots for the light layer of snow, and though I got a few glances, probably because of my strange attire - a black, short-sleeved dress and ragged socks (my shoes had been worn to tatters) - but no one crossed the street to avoid me because of it.

The town might have been nice, but I couldn't really tell through the curtain of black hair that hung in front of my face. I didn't have my mask anymore, although I probably wouldn't have worn it anyways - too attention grabbing. I threw it into the ocean in a fury after finding another one of Jeff's victims dead on a pier in Maine - and no Jeff. I wore my long, black hair in front of my face to hide my pale skin; although it was no longer pure white, as it had been when the bandages first came off, it was still pale enough to make people draw back from me on the streets. It made me self-consious, and besides that, it made me angry at the people who pulled away from me. I didn't want to be angry at them, didn't want to hate them. All my hate was reserved for Jeff; I didn't want to share. These were the people I was supposed to protect from Jeff, protect them by killing him. I couldn't really, truly protect them if I hated them.

Even if my hair was out of my face, I wouldn't have been able to tell how nice the town was, dazed with hunger as I was. I hadn't eaten in probably days - I didn't have any money anymore, I hadn't had a chance to make or steal any in a while.

It got darker, and colder, out, as I walked farther into the town. I was exhausted, from walking all day, from the cold, from being hungry. I wandered into a park and curled up inside one of the tubes on the play structure, which was cold and hard, but blocked the wind from hitting me.

I slept a long time.

When I woke up, it looked to be around midday. I crawled out the tube - I didn't want to leave, but I was starving, and in too much pain from hunger to just lay there. I wandered through the town, looking for someone whose's wallet or purse I could grab and run with. That may sound horrid, but when you're starving, a sense of need takes over you that leads you to feel that the end justifies the means. Although enough people passed by me, none of them had anything I could grab easily, or there wasn't a clear path I could run on once I got it; although I was hungry, I wasn't stupid, and the last thing I needed was to end up in jail, unable to stop Jeff, while he was out there slaughtering people.

I ended up wandering by a huge brick building that teens were spewing out of. The letters on the side of the building said it was the high school of the town.

I had been to a lot of towns in the two years I had been following Jeff for, and I found that schools were one of the best places to stay when I stopped in a town. They were warm, there were often showers in the locker rooms, so I could keep clean, there was almost always some unused closet you could sleep in, as well as hide in while class was in session, and if you hung out in the bathroom while class was going, there was almost always some kid who left their purse or pencil case by the sink, with money in it - just open it, take the cash out, and leave for my closet.

Everyone seemed to be leaving, so I figured classes were over for the day, and though that meant I couldn't steal any money from anyone today, it was warm, and I could still clean up and find a closet to sleep in.

I pulled the doors to the building open, kids glancing toward me and whispering to each other, but I didn't care. Currently, my focus was getting to the athletic department to find the locker rooms. Right now, a hot shower sounded almost as good as food.

I pushed the door open to the girl's locker room, and headed to the bathroom's showers.

I didn't get to them.

As soon as I walked through the bathroom door, I got hit with a pain to the stomach, like I had to throw up. This had happened before - I got so hungry it made me throw up, even though there wasn't anything in my stomach. I just knelt on the floor, doubled over holding my stomach, and waited for the fit of sickness to pass.

I started when heard the door to the locker room open. I hadn't really thought of the possibility of anyone coming in, but I didn't want them to see me on the floor getting sick. I struggled to my feet and ran to a bathroom stall. I tried to lock the door, but another wave of sickness hit me, and I fell to my knees, the door swinging open.

Footsteps headed for the bathrooms, then paused as they came into hearing distance.

"Hello?" called a girl's voice tentatively. I couldn't respond, of course, and the footsteps came nearer.

The girl passed by my stall, and I heard her gasp suddenly. She ran over to my side, pulling my hair back for me, and talking very fast.

"Oh, oh my gosh, are you okay? I thought someone was in here, but I didn't think they'd be sick! Did you eat something bad, or do you have the flu or something?! Should I get the nurse or someone?! Oh my gosh, are you ok?!"

When my fit of sickness finally passed, I stood up on unsteady legs, the girl helping me stand and walk out of the stall. I assured her I didn't need to go to the nurse, that I was fine.

My hair was behind my shoulders instead of in my face after she had pulled it back for me. She turned to me to say something and saw my face full-on for the first time. She closed her mouth and looked me over - my pale face, my exhausted, sunken eyes, my greasy, tangled hair, how loosely my dress hung on my thin frame. After considering me for a moment, she spoke up.

"You should come over to my house. I know this soda mixture that ALWAYS helps an upset stomach."

I agreed to go to her house; even if she was nice, I was hungry, and there was sure to be food I could take while I was there.

I found out once I got there I didn't need to steal the food. She poured soda from three different bottles into a glass, put it in front of me, and turned back to the fridge.

"Hey, are you hungry?" She asked.

"Yeah."

"What would you like?"

I think she probably knew when she took me over to her house I was homeless and hungry. She let me eat until I was full without once questioning how much I was eating, and when she asked causally if I wanted to go home or spend the night there, she didn't seem surprised when I responded with "Here, if that's okay with you."

"Totally. You can take a shower if you want to."

I did want to. Very much.

After my shower, the girl - whose name I learned was Lindsey - helped me brush out my hair, matted and knotted as it was. She pulled it into a braid for me; something my mom had sometimes done to my hair when she was alive, but that I had never learned to do myself.

I slept in Lindsey's room, which had two beds. She said her older sister and her had shared a room, and though her sister had gone to college that year, they hadn't moved the bed out yet.

That night, I slept in a real bed, clean and full, for the first time in a very long time.

Lindsey insisted I went to school with her the next day. I thought maybe I could just walk around (and acquire some money to get out of town on my never-ending chase for Jeff, although of course I didn't tell her that part), but she dragged me to the school nonetheless.

"C'mon, Jane, you were throwing up yesterday. You need to be indoors. The only reason I'm not having you stay here in bed is because if my parents come home and find you, they'd freak out." Lindsey said. The previous night, I had asked her where her parents were, and she said they were always out of the state or out of the country on business. They left her by herself, since she was sixteen. So, she had the house pretty much all to herself all the time.

I did end up going to school with her. She helped me out - putting on make-up so my skin wasn't quite so pale, helping me clip my hair back so I wouldn't brush it into my face by habit, loaning me clothes that normal teens would wear, like jeans and a T-shirt with some pop group on the front of it. She made up some story for the office to get me in classes. Apparently, according to her story, I was her cousin, but my house burned down, so I lived with her now. She even somehow got it so we had most of our classes together; I think she figured I hadn't been to school either in a long time or ever, and was nervous (and I was).

School was pretty tough, since I had been out of the classroom for so long. I was pretty confused by all this Algebra Two stuff, and the computer classes. Chemistry was torture. But World History and Creative Writing weren't awful, since all you really had to do was read, you didn't need to learn all these formulas and equations. Thankfully, Lindsey would help me out when we got home.

Lindsey and I walked home together every day. She said it was nice to go home so early - she had been on the volleyball team before, which is actually why she found me. She had been late for practice, and had came in to change after everyone else had left - and after I had arrived. I felt bad about her quitting the team just because I had showed up, but she told me that she was happy that I gave her an excuse to quit the team, claiming "the other girls on the team are fine, but the coach is the biggest jerk in North America".

I stayed with Lindsey for a week, two weeks, a month. At first, I kept thinking about how I had to leave soon, I had to go after Jeff, and Lindsey had to pester and persuade to get me to go to school, but eventually, I started thinking less about going after Jeff and more about my homework and my upcoming tests. And eventually, I settled in with Lindsey, and I didn't want to leave anymore. I had a new home, a new friend, a new sister. A new life, a normal life. And a pretty good life, too.

Me and Lindsey were close from the start, and only got closer as time went on. We went to school together, did homework together, ate together, hung out together. Within two weeks, we had a braiding-each-other's-hair type of close relationship. Lindsey asked me questions about my past, like my parents and stuff, but never pushed for answers, and any time I started to get uncomfortable with the questions, she would stop asking questions and change the subject.

Lindsey's parents did come home sometimes, and Lindsey alway's passed off my being there as me being a friend sleeping over. Which was true, but not in the way they would interpret it. They didn't really seem to care, though, and they rarely stayed for more than 24 hours.

I started to forget about Jeff entirely. During the first few weeks at Lindsey's, I felt awful every time a news report would come on, with another person dead. I felt like I was personally responsible for their deaths, like maybe if I had still been trying to catch Jeff, maybe I would have by now, maybe these people wouldn't have to be dead. But as time went on, I started to feel less like these people were dead because I hadn't stopped Jeff. I reasoned with myself that I hadn't caught him before, so why would I have caught him now? That helped, along with the fact that the police seemed to actually be getting leads (I had considered the police to be extremely incompetent up until now), and also that the number of deaths seemed to be dwindling. I figured that maybe Jeff was having trouble avoiding the police now.

I figured wrong.

I had forgotten that this wasn't really my game at all - Jeff was the one who had always made the rules for this little sick game of hide-and-seek we played, with me being the seeker. He wasn't slowing his kills because of the police pressure; it was because he knew I wasn't tailing him anymore, and he couldn't figure out why. He was trying to see if he could let me find him by slowing down his killing, wait awhile before he killed his current victim and ran off to a different part of the country to find another.

He didn't realize at that point I wasn't playing his game anymore.

When he finally did, though...I guess he decided that wasn't okay with him.

He somehow found me, in my little town with Lindsey, and let me know I wasn't excused from the game. At first, just subtle little things - a shadow, brief but definite, just outside the window at night, weird noises in the backyard after dark.

By now it was mid-December. Despite Jeff, I was managing to get into a Christmas-y mood with Lindsey. We had gotten snow a few times, but it was always just a light dusting, never anything really substantial. But one morning, Lindsey's phone went off before our alarm, waking both of us up. She flipped it open to speaker, so we could both hear it. It was an automated message from the school, letting us know there wasn't any school that day.

I pulled back the curtain to our window.

Thick snowflakes fell from a grey sky, adding to the already knee-deep drifts that covered the yards and roads.

That was one of the best days I've ever had, I think. Lindsey and I dragged a sled and a thermos of hot chocolate to the local park, which had a good-sized hill, and slid down, dragged the sled up, and slid down again for hours. We ended up going home and building a snowman on the front lawn that evening, before the sun went down. We wrapped him up in one of Lindsey's scarfs and gave him a carrot nose, with rocks for his eyes and smile.

That night, I heard a loud rap at the door. Lindsey didn't wake up; not from the rap, not from me getting up, not from the front door opening.

I already knew it was Jeff.

I could never have guessed why (though I initially thought he wanted to confront me).

In the streetlight, the snow sparkling like diamonds in the sun, like there wasn't a thing wrong with the world, the hilt of Jeff's knife showed as the tip of it gleamed in the light.

He had stuck his knife straight through our snowman's head.

For a few seconds, I just stood there, shocked and wide-eyed. Despite the shock, I already knew what I had to do.

I didn't cry.

I just went back into the house and changed back into my dress, re-making the bed and leaving the pajamas folded on it.

I didn't leave a note.

I didn't say goodbye.

I didn't want to push Jeff any further, lest he make good on his threat.

I walked out of the town that day at sunrise, not so cold as when I came in, wearing the coat and boots Lindsey had said were mine.

My face was cold soon enough, though, from the cold air freezing the tears that streamed down my face.

All around me, the snow glistened in the sun like diamonds, like there wasn't a thing wrong in the world, and two insane eyes glittered like a great wrong had been undone. Like something incomplete had finally been completed.

Of course, it had been. For him. He finally got his missing game piece back.

Only this round, I was going to win the game.

No exceptions.

My competitor felt the same way, unfortunately.

I haven't found him yet...but I will.

Because before, I was doing this to avenge a family stolen from me.

Now I'm also doing it to protect a family I can go home too.

Something I haven't lost.

Something I don't have too.

And something I won't.

The game continues.

Catz: I wrote this around Christmas, and am just now getting it up.

Meh.

I know this isn't really mythology, but it's internet lore, which is close (kinda) and I didn't know what else to put it under. So don't hate me, kay?

Review if you so desire! (I hope you do so desire, I would love to hear your thoughts ;) mkay?)

Hope you enjoyed, Skittles!


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